JJ Luna's personal privacy blog. In 1959 he moved to Spain's Canary Islands to begin a then-illegal educational work that included secret meetings in remote mountain forests. Although pursued by General Franco's Secret Police, he maintained his privacy via a false identity and was never caught. When the Spanish dictator moderated Spain’s harsh laws in 1970, Luna was free to come in from the cold. However, he remains in the shadows to this day. He is currently an international privacy consultant.

Monday, July 23, 2012

“City of Aurora, Colorado would have arrested anyone who stopped the Batman massacre with a concealed weapon”

The above is the title of a July 22nd article at naturalnews.com. Editor Mike Adams discusses the question I myself had been asking, namely, why didn’t some “FBI-background-checked individual” with a concealed carry permit pull out his or her weapon and shoot James Homes dead?

Although I myself stopped carrying a legal handgun back in the 1950s, if I’m ever in the midst of a shoot-out on a ship, train or plane, I hope that at least one of my fellow passengers carries a gun, pulls it out, and knows how to use it in self defense.

10 comments:

I don't know if you're familiar with Mike Adams or natrualnews.com (a quick search of your blog doesn't show any other citations from there and I'm a fairly new reader of your blog), but he is totally nuts and apparently loves BS conspiracy theories of all types. The headline on this article particularly bad. The fact that concealed weapons are illegal some places is not exactly a "Shock revelation", and I find it hard to believe that anyone is going to press charges if someone had had a gun and successfully stopped the killer. What jury would convict them?

I am against most gun control laws myself, mostly for practical reasons (they don't work, criminal can just ignore them, etc), but this "if only someone had just had a gun" argument is at best just naive. Most of the audience were incapacitated by the smoke before the shooting even began and the shooter had the cover of the darkness of the theater and the noise from the movie.

I have several friends who carry often, and even under ideal conditions I doubt all but one (who served in the National Guard in Iraq) would actually do any good in a situation like this. Shooting at a target is a lot different than shooting at a person amid this sort of confusion. My former National Guard friend says that his first instinct in this situation would be to get cover, then figure out WTF is going on, which in broad daylight might eat up a full minute. This whole thing only lasted for two minutes.

Someone there with a gun may very well have gotten lucky or with the right training (like a cop maybe) been able to make a difference, but the point of my rant is that when people like Mike Adams write diatribes like the one you linked to - and it's not even the worst one on that site - they just come across as assholes taking advantage of a horrible situation for their own good. Nothing about his article and many like it take into account the specifics of this situation, and are the exact same cookie cutter arguments used every time something like this happens. Despicable.

I don't know if you're familiar with Mike Adams or natrualnews.com (a quick search of your blog doesn't show any other citations from there and I'm a fairly new reader of your blog), but he is totally nuts and apparently loves BS conspiracy theories of all types. The headline on this article particularly bad. The fact that concealed weapons are illegal some places is not exactly a "Shock revelation", and I find it hard to believe that anyone is going to press charges if someone had had a gun and successfully stopped the killer. What jury would convict them?

I am against most gun control laws myself, mostly for practical reasons (they don't work, criminal can just ignore them, etc), but this "if only someone had just had a gun" argument is at best just naive. Most of the audience were incapacitated by the smoke before the shooting even began and the shooter had the cover of the darkness of the theater and the noise from the movie.

I have several friends who carry often, and even under ideal conditions I doubt all but one (who served in the National Guard in Iraq) would actually do any good in a situation like this. Shooting at a target is a lot different than shooting at a person amid this sort of confusion. My former National Guard friend says that his first instinct in this situation would be to get cover, then figure out WTF is going on, which in broad daylight might eat up a full minute. This whole thing only lasted for two minutes.

Someone there with a gun may very well have gotten lucky or with the right training (like a cop maybe) been able to make a difference, but the point of my rant is that when people like Mike Adams write diatribes like the one you linked to - and it's not even the worst one on that site - they just come across as assholes taking advantage of a horrible situation for their own good. Nothing about his article and many like it take into account the specifics of this situation, and are the exact same cookie cutter arguments used every time something like this happens. Despicable.

I would wonder whether someone else in the theater who had a gun and was able to shoot James Holmes could have done anything, since Holmes was allegedly wearing a great deal of body armor to protect himself from being shot. Maybe we all need to start wearing body armor when we go out...

This is yet another event that we privacy advocates hope never to endure. I would think that none of the victims of this shooting woke up that day thinking, “I’m going to be on the national news today. My name and face will be plastered everywhere and played back repeatedly for all the world to see. My family’s lives will be forever upheaved just because they are related to one of the victims of this tragedy. The news and media people will never give us a moment’s peace.”

And imagine if someone, somehow had been able to stop Holmes by either shooting him OR tackling him to the ground with brute force and holding him there until police arrived. His or her name and face would forever be placed right up there next to James Holmes as the person who stopped a great tragedy from happening. The privacy that they once enjoyed would be no more.

I attended this specific theater many times. I am aware of Aurora gun laws - and Colorado's in general, and I'm afraid all of the facts and evidence presented in that article are false.

I recently obtained a concealed carry permit, doing my training and certification literally a few blocks from this theater.

So, I feel my information is much more up to date than this linked article. To my knowledge, concealed carry permits are acknowledged in all parts of Colorado, with the specific exception of Denver city limits (this does not include the surrounding suburbs, such as Aurora).

Even if I had happened to attend the theater that night (thankfully I instead decided to have dinner with friends), it would not have helped much because this theater specifically posts "NO WEAPONS" signs, and has officers patrol the lobby and parking lots as well.

While the laws in Colorado may be amenable to concealed carry, the issue still remains that many places where large groups of people make it clear that weapons are not allowed. While I feel that is their right as private businesses, I think it makes it clear that helpful gun laws will do little without an appropriate change in perspective of the public at large.

20 out of 200 with weapons is just wishful thinking. According to http://legallyarmed.com/ccw_statistics.htm there are 139,560 CCW permits in Colorado, which works out to 2.7% of the population. This is in line with other states, even the more lenient ones. So best case scenario assuming everyone with a CCW permit carries 100% of the time, out of every 200 people, only 5 are packing.

But I think you missed the whole point of my comment, which was not that CCW is bad. I don't think it is! I think trying to restrict it is just dumb. BUT, when you start repeating arguments like yours and Mike's without any consideration to the particulars of the situation, you are obviously letting your ideology smother your critical thinking.

Interesting comments. I carry concealed and do not and will not ever obtain a license to do something that is an inherent right anymore than I would beg a "food purchasing license" from "my" government.

End of the story is a lot of folks were killed by someone with a gun when someone else with a gun would have been the best chance of saving any of those lives. Any adult in that theater who was killed or injured or had a loved one killed or injured did so because they failed to act. They had the opportunity to obtain a weapon and train to use that weapon in dire circumstances and they failed to do so.

As for me, in such a situation with loved ones to defend, I have NO doubt I would return fire, likely while running AT the gunman, danger be damned. Just like the passengers attacking the terrorist and taking down the plane - what is there to lose?